The Moon
by Lady Solitaire
Summary: Contemplation on the eve of the full moon. RLSB slash, RLNT.


The sky is dark. Inky blue, only the stars and moon permeate the gloom. Trees, mountains, birds, buildings, all are now only black shadows in a world blanketed by darkness. They loom out of the inky gloom, indeterminate dark figures suddenly reduced to silhouettes. In this dark nightlife, almost the entire spectrum has been forsaken. Only blue remains, deepest blue, which will blacken into nothingness as the night wears on, sure enough.

The moon is almost full. It hands there, low in the sky tonight, its iridescent surface shedding silvery light on the ghosts of clouds that pass it. It has a kind of melancholy beauty, a misty orb seemingly all alone in the infinite blue sky. He can see the shadows on its face, the imperfections, never changing. The moon, like everything else around him, is imperfect. He likes this thought. He decides to keep it.

Tonight the moon is almost a full circle, its furthermost edge still steeped in shadows. Perhaps tomorrow evening it will become complete, full, round, shining. Perhaps the evening after. Who knows? He does. He has it marked down, a small black circle in the corner of the square that marks tomorrow on his calendar. Not many people know what the circle means, But he does, and he knows that tomorrow the moon will change, if only the smallest amount. Most people won't even notice it, the tiniest alteration to the shape of the moon, almost insignificant in its smallness – but enough.

He wishes it wouldn't. He wishes he could stop its path, halt it – make it disappear. Christ, he wishes he could make the moon vanish completely. On the night of the new moon he can pretend, as he stares into the night, that the moon isn't there, never was, never will be again. It's around the closest he gets to happy these days. But then he gets up, and goes inside, and stares into the mirror. An his eyes trace the faint white scars that riddle his body, usually safely hidden by his laughable clothes. And he knows that the moon is real.

Tomorrow it will be more real than ever. Tomorrow the cursed orb will reach the height of its realness. He calls it realness, even though the word is laughable, simply because he doesn't know what else to call it. What name do you give the feeling he gets when he looks into the sky, the bone chilling feeling of dread that courses through him, unhindered. Unhindered – his pathetic brain may as well lay down a welcome mat for all the hindrance it presents. Thank you brain. Another winner.

The feeling is worse nowadays, now that he has no one to help him with it. She offers, of course she offers. But he can't drag her into it, not when he looks where it got everyone else who tried to help him. Dead, dead, dead – and the last may as well be dead.

But in the old days, they could help to hinder the feeling, and now he smiles in spite of himself. _Heady days,_ he thinks, and then immediately regrets the cliché.

He's been doing a lot of thinking lately, and he always seems to do it here, in his chair near the window, looking into the sky. He should really stop brooding over the moon; it inspires sentiment, which he could do without. And it makes him very philosophically minded, in which state he is prone to come out with a lot of long-winded rubbish.

At least, those are the reasons he gives himself.

In actual fact, the main reason he should probably stop staring at the moon – and the reason he ever does in the first place – is that the silver moon reminds him of a pair of silver eyes, eyes that never quite learnt to stay still. Eyes lost, found, then lost again. He remembers those damn eyes, and the man they belonged to, and the voice that housed them, and the smile that set them off, and the feeling that he used to get when Sirius Black would so much as speak his name. He remembers that feeling. It's not unlike the one he gets when she – Tonks – arrives on his doorstep, her own eyes so similar, smiling at him. He tells himself to keep away from her, that he'll only end up hurting her like he hurt him.

But he can't deny the feeling, the feeling of Tonks, of Sirius, of everything he ever enjoyed, laughed about, smiled about. That feeling – he thinks it's called love. He can't quite remember.

But he's more than willing to let the almost-full moon and its accompanying feelings invade for one second, if it means it can remind him, and let him feel that love for just one night.


End file.
